An anomic interzone at the nexus of disco and new wave, 1981 needed the Cars more than ever. While the hundreds of Steve Dahls working as programming directors stuck with ugly AOR bands, the Boston quintet had done their part to popularize carousel keyboards, blocky rhythms, and splashes of controlled guitar anarchy, as well as the affected vocals beloved by Anglophiles who regarded Roxy Music and Bowie as the church of man love. Exploiting the possibilities of FM radio, 1978’s The Cars and 1980’s Panorama offered songs as gleaming and formidable as a new Impala; hell, song titles like “Moving in Stereo” could’ve been taglines for Impala ads.
In that pre-MTV era, the Cars were an ideal first vehicle—fleet and meaningless, sure, in Robert Christgau’s ambivalent judgment, but also educational, for their meaningless was the point. Remember: This was a time when Styx had to doll up romantic banalities with elephantine concepts like Kilroy Was Here. By contrast, singer-guitarist Ric Ocasek wrote hooky songs about girls on hoods: dumb but not stupid, sexist but not offensive. They were touring vets whose stunted idea of female sexuality—and men’s, too—resonated with their teenaged fans. Ensuring their popularity, the Cars bridged rock’s swelling boomer gerontocracy and the kids besotted with power pop. Those harmonies? A cyborgian distortion of 10cc and the Eagles. Elliot Easton’s riffs? The Edgar Winter Group might’ve played them.
Thanks, again, to Rhino, fans can enjoy Shake It Up and 1984’s blockbuster Heartbeat City baited with demos and single remixes. For audiophiles, owning these uneven albums in crisper mixes than the boxy sound of the original CD releases will give them a sense of how the Cars moved in stereo; fans can follow how the band became pop stars with “Shake It Up” and Heartbeat City’s “Drive,” sung by bassist Benjamin Orr, often mistaken for Ocasek despite the prettier voice.
Given the stature of, say, “Just What I Needed” and “Let’s Go” on album rock and oldies radio, it’s still a surprise to learn that the title track of Shake It Up became the Cars’ first top-10 hit in America, in early 1982. But not much else took (imagine a half-dozen variants on the debut’s “Don’t Cha Stop”) until, bizarrely, the ballad “I’m Not the One” appeared in remixed form on 1985’s Greatest Hits, and as a single. Shimmying Stone Age drum machines and Elliot Easton’s wistful sigh of a guitar bend, “I’m Not the One” is a study in paradox: Romantic melody and harmonies foil Ocasek’s “It Ain’t Me Babe”-style declarations and pinched delivery. The remainder of Shake It Up has the aura of contract fulfillment, a recovery of commercial momentum after the relative failure of 1980’s Panorama—a worthwhile follow-up to 1979’s Candy-O and the eponymous debut, and one of the steeliest albums ever to make the top 10. Shake It Up’s “A Dream Away” survives as a reminder of what was.
Between these two albums, though, Ocasek released Beatitude, a crucial link between his day job and the more outré bands he produced. It deserves a listen for “Jimmy Jimmy,” a worried valentine to a teenager in the throes of sexual frustration and sexual confusion. Unreliant on curt intimations of un-weird sins, Ocasek’s lyrics for once tell a story. Drum machines thud. Synthesizers imitate the rattle of a foul industrial wind—the influence of Ocasek clients Suicide. Ocasek uses irony for poignancy: The more detached his performance, the more moving the scenario. He allows himself to use “We’re all in this together” as a refrain; coming from Ric fucking Ocasek, this is like hearing “God bless you and keep you” from Donald Trump.
A promising dead end, “Jimmy Jimmy” influenced Heartbeat City insofar as it showed how to strip a song to its chassis. Ocasek and Robert John “Mutt” Lange, the latter applying the lacquered reproductions learned with Def Leppard’s Pyromania, did similar transformations. “The Cars” ceased to exist except as perfect sounds pounded out of Greg Hawkes’ Fairlight keyboard (David Robinson admitted he did little live drumming). The result is as subtle as a gas fire and as loud a thermonuclear explosion. A considerable hit that rode the top 10 for months in 1984, Heartbeat City is often forgotten as one of the year’s pop music touchstones. Like Billy Ocean’s Suddenly and the Pointer Sisters’ Break Out, it was a mini-Thriller: five singles, including three top 15s, all of which, to use industry palaver, dominated all the markets, especially MTV, where Ocasek’s gaunt ice-packed face joined the iconography of the era as surely as David Lee Roth’s mugging and Cyndi Lauper’s dancing.
The moment when seemingly everyone in sixth grade saw the same videos had a marked effect on pop. Thanks to Thriller, record companies bled albums dry; thanks to MTV, the songs turned into aural accompaniment to videos, which made those songs flashier and hookier than anything in a generation. The rat-tat-tat keyboard hook of “You Might Think” complemented its animated antics, MTV’s first Video of the Year winner: Ocasek riding a jackhammer on model Susan Gallagher’s teeth, turning into a fly, into King Kong. Well, it was amusing for anyone who was 10. For “Magic,” dependent on Orr’s ethereal multi-tracked harmonies, Ocasek walked on pool water so shiny that David Hockney’s reproductions look like bogs. Andy Warhol made a cameo in “Hello Again.”
Chic and as chewy as nougat, the Orr showcase “Drive,” a rewrite of “I’m Not the One,” became the Cars’ biggest hit; the Live Aid organizers used it to soundtrack footage of starving Ethiopian children, in a move that the archangel Gabriel will explain on the Day of Judgment. The title track inexplicably appeared on cassette and CD versions of the 1985 comp. As for the rest of Heartbeat City, return to the phrase “bled dry.” Discrete touches matter. “I Refuse,” for example, is reliant on Orr-Ocasek call-and-response vocals; “It’s Not the Night” boasts an unwelcome AOR rhythm-guitar chug. Better to regard Heartbeat City as a Lange palimpsest on which listeners can read the traces of subsequent productions. The massed “Hello”s that cold-open “Hello Again”? A first draft of Def Leppard’s “Pour Some Sugar on Me” and the Corrs’ “Breathless.”
Like Hall and Oates, the Cars barely made it past the first Reagan term—no one bought 1987’s Nice Price-rack perennial Door to Door. Better to end with a marvelous example of fleet meaninglessness: “Tonight She Comes,” their last top 10, recorded for the 1985 comp and included on the Heartbeat City reissue. Easton, for the most part cowed and quashed on the last album, unleashes a series of whammy-bar dives and soars that, set against Hawkes’ pastel synth interjections, a playful Ocasek vocal, and Orr-acular harmonies, demonstrated the salience of noise-annoys: A splatter looks great against a sparkling clean kitchen floor.
Other than a solo hit single apiece for Ocasek and Orr in 1986 and 1987, that was that for the Cars; it’s if humankind could no longer bear so much precision. Ocasek would pack up his toys and produce the likes of Weezer, whose own adolescent fantasies were, shall we say, more inchoate than the ones Ocasek chose to share. Skip Shake It Up and Heartbeat City and you won’t miss much if you own the greatest hits, but students of pop understand: Those who don’t know their history are condemned to choke on the exhaust fumes of progress—or regression. It was hard to tell where the Cars stood.
